This artistic idea focuses on blue cog “bridges” for “troubled water” emotions.

Pupils first created collage landscapes, with a textured blue paper river in the centre.

Next, children were asked to think of a time they felt a troubling or difficult emotion and how they overcame this. (The emotion didn’t have to be named, though some children may find this helpful.) Pupils used Emotion Works symbol resources to prompt suggestions and created a shared list of regulation strategies. From this list, pupils created collage “bricks” to build a bridge over their collage waters. Each brick contained a different regulation strategy. 

This was a highly engaging blue cog lesson, and makes for a great visual display.